Book One – Chapter 2

The moment it settled into place, the dormant relations within the mirror woke. Pale seams of light surfaced beneath the glass. The first of them were scarcely more than hair-thin traces suspended inside the crystal, but they began to separate and spread. Each line divided into finer fractures, and those divided again, until the increasingly delicate pattern reached every edge of the mirror without ever breaking its surface. Yves’ reflected face fractured with it. Every fragment held him, so now, he was there many times more, and yet never again whole—

Lightning struck the arch. His shield rose on impulse, spreading between the impact, Midnight and himself. Light burst across the shard barrier. Most of the strike scattered aside. What Yves deflected, the mirror received. Silver raced through the frame in a branching flare. Violet answered in various depths, and the engraved sigils brightened in sequence, each reaching into the next until, for one impossible instant, the entire enchantment became legible at once. For this one fraction in time, all of their connections, every channel and every dependency, became visible. The mirror revealed the whole of its construction in light.
Then the pattern collapsed; too quickly for the eye to preserve it. Within another breath and blink, the sigils had vanished entirely. At the same time, an obscurity of darkness spread outwards from the central socket. It did not settle upon the glass like shadow. It deepened through it, swallowing colour first, reflection next, and then every last trembling trace of the crater.

Yves stared as the glass ceased to return the world. In the end, no image remained. The surface was now fully opaque. It never showed what lay beyond. Once the half-sphere had settled and the enchantment anchored around it, the mirror offered nothing to ordinary sight. Even through Second Sight, Yves found no counterpart presence beneath the dark, only the same absence as before.